Black Friday midnight foes deliver petition to Target. We can now resume our regularly scheduled programming.

Occupy Target it wasn't.

There were no tents, bull horns, or riot police but rather a pleasant looking clergyman helping to transfer three Target bags (plastic no less) worth of signed petitions to an executive at the company's corporate headquarters in Minneapolis.

Come to think of it, why didn't the Occupy movement crash the party? I guess that's the subject of another blog post.

The highly scripted, somewhat awkward, completely anticlimactic event capped a grassroots campaign to shame Target for its decision to open stores at midnight Black Friday. Launched by Anthony Hardwick, a Target employee in Omaha, Neb., the online petition via Change.org attracted more than 190,000 signatures.

Hardwick didn't attend but Seth Coleman did. Change.org chose its man well. A loading dock worker in Northfield, Coleman looked like a man not too happy about spending a big chunk of his Thanksgiving holiday with his employer.

Coleman dutifully read a statement that began: "All Americans should break bread on Thanksgiving and get a good night's sleep."

OK, fair enough. Personally, I like to break bread and sleep well every day and not necessarily in that order but heck, that's just me.

"If you do nothing, nothing will change," Coleman said. "The problem would still be there at your next job."

Another reporter asked him about the people who don't have jobs. Shouldn't Coleman just feel lucky to be employed?

"It's not like I'm making six figures," he retorted.

In other words, workers don't chuck their grievances at the door. In America, we all have the right to feel equally lousy about our jobs, whether we're CEOs or cashiers.

As for Target, a human resources official had a prepared statement to read.

I instantly wondered how exactly Target's guests expressed their desire to shop at midnight. Did they launch an online petition and deliver three bag loads of signatures to Target corporate headquarters?